Fault Diagnosis Technique Applied to Pitch System Sensors of a Wind Turbine

This paper deals with the fault detection and diagnosis problem in a Wind Turbine (W.T) machine. A simple and efficient diagnosis structure has been explained and investigated for sensor faults in the pitch angle system of a WT benchmark. This detection method is based on sensor hardware redundancy to generate errors as residuals between all physically measured variables. A crisp logic procedure is used to treat the obtained residuals, in order to define and classify the occurred faults in the studied dynamic system. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed diagnosis method to identify faults successfully in the pitch angle system of the used WT.